At hindsight, the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation authorities might now be thanking the people of Vilappilsala who organised a strong protest movement to close down the centralised waste treatment plant in their village.
For years, the city’s waste had piled up in and around the plant, causing much difficulty for the people around. The protest, and the consequent closure of the plant, made the civic body rethink its waste management practices, which led to the slow but still incomplete shift towards decentralised waste management.
Despite the recent lessons from Vilappilsala, the State government had in 2018 attempted to set up a centralised waste-to-energy plant in Peringamala panchayat near the city. But, a year later, that plan was dropped due to sustained local protests.
According to the Corporation’s own estimates, as much as 423 tonnes of waste is being produced daily from close to four lakh houses and more than 25,000 institutions in the city.
The Corporation, at present, does not have a formal system for collecting biodegradable waste from houses, although some groups have been doing it unofficially in some wards, after making arrangements with pig farms. Some of the biodegradable waste ends up in the 513 community-based aerobic bins set up at 53 locations. The Corporation is planning to add at least a hundred more to this.
After its earlier plan for pipe composting at home failed to find success, the Corporation began pushing for kitchen bins a few years back. The lack of adequate technical support and proper supply of inoculum had led quite a few of the residents who purchased it enthusiastically to abandon it.
The Corporation is now attempting to address this through trained ‘green technicians’ from the Haritha Karma Sena. This year, the plan is to have kitchen bins in at least 80% of the houses, so that a large chunk of the biodegradable waste is taken care of.
Managing to clear the major waste dumps in the city, where years of legacy waste had piled up remains one of the major achievements of the Corporation in the post-Vilappilsala period.
At Vilappilsala, the waste dumps were capped a few years back. A mini township project is set to come up on this land now. In 2020, biomining was carried out at the sprawling dumping yard at Erumakuzhy close to the main city bus stand at East Fort. The myriad kinds of waste were segregated and sent for recycling, while the area was turned into a park.
The dumping yard behind the Connemara Market at Palayam was also retrieved using similar methods. Now, the city Corporation is set to similarly clean up recently formed dump yards, especially in the coastal areas. The biomining activities of the past few years have enabled the Corporation’s health wing officials to breathe easy in the days following the major fire at Brahmapuram.
The Corporation has made arrangements with 14 agencies to collect food waste from the city’s restaurants to be transported to the pig farms in the adjacent panchayats. As for handling non-biodegradable waste, the city has a fairly efficient system for segregated collection of different types of waste through material recovery facilities. The periodic collection of waste at the ward-level is pretty popular.
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